All About Point of View: An Interview with ‘Maestro’ Co-Writer Josh Singer

Maestro is a towering and fearless love story chronicling the lifelong relationship between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. A love letter to life and art, Maestro at its core is an emotionally epic portrayal of family and love.

Writing biopics is no easy feat. It can and will take what seems like endless years of research and never-ending rabbit holes. The most difficult part is typically, why am I telling this story? And heck, what is the story? And then here comes Maestro, a slice-of-life film about the legendary egocentric and charismatic film composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. But it’s more than that. It’s a likely love story taking an unlikely detour after the next. And the heartbeat driving the story and Lenny, is his wife, companion, and champion, Felicia Montealegre.

During this in-depth interview with Maestro co-writer Josh Singer, we discuss how Josh became attached to the project in 2008 to it eventually landing in the hands of Bradley Cooper as star and director, how research, directly and indirectly, infused the script, the use of magical realism and passage of time, and how breaking a few screenwriting rules like writing camera direction can be a storytelling tool, and the importance of point of view from the camera's perspective, and what is it conveying.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: When you were laying down the foundation for the story from all of the research I’m sure you conducted over many, many years – how did you land on finding the heart of the story, which is Felicia?

Josh Singer: Yeah, it's interesting, because this has, as all great movies do, and I'm not saying this is a great movie, but [laughs] as all movies, this movie has had many lives. The first one began actually in 2008, Fred Berner and Amy Durning, who had just done Pollock, had the idea for a Leonard Bernstein movie - went to the family, negotiated the rights, went to Marty Scorsese, who was intrigued and then they came to me. And I'd written a spec on George Gershwin writing Porgy and Bess. I was a Whiffenpoof in college, an acapella singer. And I've long loved musical theater and specifically growing up singing in synagogue choir, I've long loved Jewish composers. I was sort of fascinated with the story of when Gershwin decided to stop making musical theater, which he was basically king of Broadway, to make an opera. 

And so, I'd written a spec on that. And that spec was actually what broke me into the feature world. And it was because of that, that, Fred and Amy and my agent at the time said, ‘Hey, Josh, would you be interested in Leonard Bernstein?’ I didn't know much about Lenny, other than I knew West Side Story, obviously. And knew little bits and pieces of On the Town. And I had a friend in college who had studied with Lenny, and that was about it.

And so, I sort of jumped in. I pitched Marty, which was a fantastic one-hour meeting, but that's really all it was. I got the green light to get going. And I did a ton of research. I went to the family. They introduced me to a bunch of different people. I read a ton. There's a great Humphrey Burton biography, I went down the Library of Congress and started researching, and a bunch of great letters had come out. There have been a bunch of letters that had been kept under seal for the years, probably for, I guess, 20 years, maybe even 25 years since after his death…which revealed a great deal more about his sexuality than had been previously known. And it was all really fascinating to me. And I started working on the script.

And what's interesting is the script I wrote was really about Lenny's ascent. Essentially, he has his debut in ‘43 at 25. He writes Fancy Free, which turns into On the Town, which is a smash hit on Broadway right after, and then sort of wanders around because [Serge] Koussevitzky, his mentor, who ran the Boston Symphony Orchestra tells him not to write musical theater, and he's a little lost for a bunch of years, and then Koussevitzky dies and he immediately marries Felicia. They had been engaged and then separated, and then they got married. And when he marries her, he has this burst of wonderful creativity, where he writes Wonderful Town. And then he writes Candide and West Side Story, at the same time, he starts doing the Omnibus specials on TV, he starts doing the Young People's Concerts, and then winds up taking over the New York Philharmonic. And so, the 50s are this glory decade for him. And my script really focused on that ascent, because it was fun. And because that's really when he's most struggling with conducting versus composing.

Felicia was sort of the B-story, because she comes along as she grounds him. And there are great letters that she writes, one of which we quote in Maestro, “You are a homosexual, you may never change, I happen to love you as you are. Let's see what happens if you are free to do as you like, without guilt or confession, please, let's give it a whirl.” And that that letter was central to my piece as well. It just came at the end of the movie, as opposed to the beginning of the movie. [laughs]

So, I wrote this script and Marty quickly said, ‘No, thank you. I'm still interested in producing, but this is not my cup of tea.’ I just finished The Post with Steven [Spielberg], and I slipped it to him and Kristie [Macosko Krieger], and they flipped for it, which was great. And so, we worked on it for six months, and then the rights came up. At that point, the Bernstein's had been with Fred and Amy for years, and they were not sure they wanted to renew the option, especially because Jake Gyllenhaal had been working on his own project and had started maybe whispering in the ear of the Bernstein kids. And we had nothing, and they had Jake Gyllenhaal and a script. And so they were, I think, considering switching horses. And Steven had loved my script. So, I was like, ‘Well, let's just send them my script, and they'll see that they should stick with us, because we've got a great script, and we're gonna get made.’ And we sent them my script. And they're like, ‘Yeah, we don't really love this.’ [laughs] And it was this incredibly humbling moment. Because I thought it was pretty good. And Steven thought it was pretty good, but they did not.

I think what they really didn't love about the script was it was a little more in the, like, hagiography of Lenny. Right? And yes, it dealt with his struggles in sexuality, but didn't really deal with some of the darker sides of his narcissism. And what happened later, when he and Felicia briefly separated when he lost Felicia. As Jamie has said, her father could be exhausting. And I was afraid to get into all that. And so, we almost lost them.

But fortunately, Steven, and I kept going for a minute and Steven and Kristie sent the script to Bradley [Cooper]. And he liked what was in there and the subject matter enough that he sort of was intrigued and then when Steven said, ‘I don't think I'm going to direct it,’ because of the West Side Story, he said, ‘Well, can I direct?’ And then there's the famous story of us all going to watch A Star Is Born. [laughs]

To me what was remarkable about what Bradley did is, first of all, he went and met with the kids and convinced them to hang on with us. [laughs] And he also came up with an entirely different take on the material, which, at first was very daunting, because we essentially threw out the first script.. I'd worked on it for a while, and it was tough, but he didn't throw me out, he kept me on board. And we started our own Odyssey, which really was very much focused on Felicia and as you said, it was about digging back through and looking at, specifically at all the letters between Lenny and Felicia.

There was a book called "The Private World of Leonard Bernstein" where John Gruen, who's played in the movie by Josh Hamilton, had gone to Italy with the family for three months and interviewed them. And there were tons of tapes of interviews of all the members of the family, and of course, extensive interviews with Lenny and Felicia, and from those interviews of Felicia, a very clear portrait of her and the marriage was depicted. And so, we were able to take from that. And it was really that book and those tapes that Gruen made that I think led us towards, ‘Oh, the marriage is the story.’ And what came out of that was the current script, which of course, we did hundreds of drafts on, but which really, I think got at something much more universal than anything I had done in my first iterations.

Sadie: I had the opportunity to read the screenplay, thanks to Deadline for posting. There's so many things in here that are at first glance the big noes for beginning screenwriters, like don't ever do these things in your screenplays.

Josh: [laughs]

Sadie: But you guys break these rules in such a graceful way, in which it ebbs and flows, keeping the reader emotionally hooked. It’s a wonderful orchestration of hitting those emotional beats with Felicia. In the script, you’re actually writing camera direction.

Josh: Yeah.

Sadie: Specifically, one of my favorite scenes is how you deal with the passage of time, the dance sequence for On the Town. And if you're not paying close attention, you're gonna miss a lot…

Josh: Yeah.

Sadie: You’re easily covering 10 years of their life in a maybe three-minute scene. I would just love to talk about writing in camera direction and just how you encapsulate time and scenes in scene direction.

Josh: Yeah, I tend to always write with strong camera direction. And I do that, not because I'm directing the film, but more as inspiration for the director. So, the director will see visually what I'm after, and what I'm imagining in my head. And sometimes the director will take those ideas, and sometimes they won't, sometimes we'll have talks beforehand. On First Man, Damien [Chazelle] and I had very clear conversations, because he had a real sense of…’this is how I want to handle each of these things visually.’

And so, when I'm writing that extra team sequence in the cockpit…what's gonna make that exciting? How's that going to feel? And just hear a bunch of pitches on the page and now you visual genius, Damien Chazelle, go, take what you want, and you'll discard most of it, but you'll at least be stimulated by what you're reading. Right?

And to me, what it really all comes down to is point of view. And one of the things Bradley said to me early on, which is how he thinks about it when we talk about film, he's always talking about why is the camera there? What is the point in the camera being here or there? Or what are you doing with the camera? How are you telling the story with the camera? Which is also how Steven works and how all great directors work, I think. And so, for that reason, that was always something that was close to our thoughts, as we were writing.

And then, specifically, when you get into that sequence, you're talking about the musical sequence, magical realism was something I used a ton in my first scripts. And initially, Bradley had really sparked to it, really loved that. And then as we sort of worked forward, we realized we wound up doing less and less and less of it, in part because once you get to the back half of the script, and in the color section, it doesn't really fit. We had a couple of magical realism things in there, which over time, we just discarded because it's not magical in the same way. Whereas the past, especially in black and white, feels like you have a little more license, right? And so there are things like, the debut, and it's somewhat true, it's mostly based in reality, and that Lenny did actually live there - there were apartments for artists in Carnegie Hall. So, Lenny literally lived over Carnegie Hall, so him running down to the hall in his bathrobe is something that quite possibly could have happened. And we flipped through time very quickly, but in a way that is related to what's going on in his life. And the same thing with Koussevitzky, very much there is this struggle at that point in his life between Koussevitzky saying ‘no musical theater,’ and his desire to do musical theater.

So, we sort of pull them right together. And what if we not only pull them through, but have Felicia pull him from Koussevitzky right into the rehearsals for Fancy Free? But then what if we then speed through – do a dance ballet, a dream ballet - Damien just brought 'em back, right [laughs] in La La Land, they were very much a piece of what you did back then. So why not do a dream ballet where you can do some things like showing the struggle that they had in their early courtship because we're not going to get into like they were engaged, and then they were separated, and then they were engaged. And then he's pulled away by the sailors who he's canoodling with. In the meantime, she's pulled away by Dick Hart, and it's very subtle. It's very quick. You've met Dick Hart once, but he's a very handsome man, hopefully, you're gonna remember him when he pulls off a sailor hat. And there he is looking at Felicia and she's confused. What does she do? And then eventually, they come back together, right?

And so to me, there's a way and look, there's a lot that's quite subtle in the movie...and if you know Bernstein's life, you're gonna get it. And if you don't, it might go over your head, and then you're gonna go back and rewatch and say, ‘Oh, wow, this is what they were doing.’ And we were OK with that, again, because the focus was always on the marriage. And to me, especially when you're talking about camera, and camera position, it's all about, what are you trying to say in a given scene? What is the point of view of a given scene? And for us, the point of view is always, always on the marriage. And it was something Bradley was very focused on. I'd like to think that if I went back and looked at all the camera directions and angles in that script, they'd all be pushing you in that direction and helping tell that story, which is what ultimately, Bradley's camera did on the day and in the piece.

Sadie: It’s definitely one of those films for students of film. A lot at play. And the homages that are in there, especially with the black and white footage going into color and again, how that carries the passage of time and their story down to magical realism in the black and white footage.

Josh: Yeah.

Sadie: All the truth is in color - you can't hide it.

Josh: That's correct. That's correct.

Sadie: Once you two were focusing on this love story between Lenny and Felicia, was that ultimately the north star til the very last beat of the film?

Josh: I think both of us like, again, this is where the raw materials are so helpful. The Murrow interview, which is in the middle of the piece…I wouldn't say it's verbatim, but it is an edited version of that Person to Person segment that Edward Murrow did with Lenny and Felicia. And the way they interact, and the way she is clearly his anchor, and yet, he's still talking about being a schizophrenic - that feels like it encompasses everything. And so that was a real touchstone.

Similarly, the movie begins and ends with this interview with Lenny. And one thing that's interesting about that is he actually was indeed interviewed by Mike Wallace for 60 minutes after Felicia had passed. And so, we've taken bits, ‘your summer sings in me’ is something that happened in that interview. And also, the way he talks about Felicia, and how he misses her. Is also quite present and powerful. And so there were extraordinary moments, which even though they were in public, were quite revelatory, in terms of who they were and who they were to each other.

And then, of course, beyond that, you watch the 12 years after Felicia dies, and Lenny's totally lost. He's still teaching, and he's still conducting. But he spirals into pills and alcohol and gets tremendously fat…he becomes this sort of lost soul, because he doesn't have his anchor.

And so frankly, it was all of that. It was seeing all of that in the research that really just pointed to this marriage and what it was. And so then in the script, it's about, what are we going to use that's literally from the Mike Wallace interview. And the People to People Murrow interview, and literally, when Lenny leaves Felicia, he announces it to the New York Philharmonic on a Thursday afternoon, which is exactly what he did in December 76, where he said, ‘I have to live as I want the way more and more of us are doing in this day and age.’ And he looks at Tommy in the wings, right? Some of it is all just there and then some of it is what organically grows from that. Her having tea at The Plaza and talking about, which was, again, a real story about how she had a suitor who actually wanted to be fixed up with Mendy Wager. And yet she misses him because she made this bargain. And she fooled herself. Which again, it all comes from research and yet grows organically beyond that.

And so to me, what I'm proud of in this screenplay is that I can point to every moment of the film, and point to where it came from. Right from the research, and yet, I don't think it feels like an encyclopedia entry, or a research project, it feels organic and real. And some of that is all the work we did. And then some of that is just what Bradley brings as an actor and a director enveloping it in this world in this reality that makes it all feel organic and like a slice of their life just manifesting in front of us.

Maestro is now streaming on Netflix.